GM planning 300km EV

We’ll never know, but Australia might have missed out on the chance to build a plug-in vehicle that ticks all the boxes for mass acceptance: long range, flexible fuelling and the right price.

Influential US magazine BusinessWeek has farewelled Dan Akerson, the outsider CEO credited with saving GM from the global financial crisis (with help from President Obama and co), and welcomed successor Mary Barra with a lengthy feature casting a rosy glow across the Detroit giant’s future.

It’s all bonhomie and good-luck-old-chap, but buried deep within its folds is a hint of what Australia’s manufacturing sector might have missed out on now GM’s set to leave these shores as a manufacturer.

Amid the farewells, the mag said, Akerson made mention of a rabbit the company is working on pulling from its R&D hat in its successor to the Volt plug-in hybrid.

Probably best to get it from the guys who got it from the horse’s mouth: “Akerson says [GM is] aiming for a compact car that can go 200 miles (320km) on a charge and carry a generator, too,” BusinessWeek reports.

Got that? A battery range of 300km or more, plus a top-up range-extending engine.

Let’s continue: “While it will be similar to the Volt, engineers are working on generators that could run on gas, diesel, or natural gas.”

Sounds like quite the breakthrough, doesn’t it?

But wait – they’re not done yet: “The increased electric range is coming, in part, from advances in battery chemistry. GM is planning to bring the model out in 2016, for about $US30,000, according to a person familiar with the idea who asked not to be named because the plans aren’t public,” the mag continues.

“It’s a project that the company doesn’t want to say much about but signifies how it’s been trying to move past inventing things to putting inventions into showrooms. ‘We want it to be a moon shot so we can surprise the competition,’ Akerson says.”

Well, there goes the surprise.

This kind of feature is highly conducive to vapourware, of course. More so than normal, perhaps, when it’s all about a departing CEO with less to lose than an incumbent one.

Given that alt-power is clearly gaining momentum on GM’s product agenda, that Australia already has a Cruze production line, that the Cruze forms the basis of the Volt, which half-way opened the door to eventually assuming Volt production duties, and that the upcoming vehicle is being mooted as either a replacement for the current Volt or the beginnings of an expanded Volt family... might Australia possibly have blown a look into building what may be GM’s most important car in decades?

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